Weekly Links Roundup – WooCommerce, Staging Sites, Ecommerce SEO

This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

First… WooCommerce 3.0.0 will be released on (or soon after) April 4, 2017. This will be a big one and like all major WooCommerce releases, you should be prepared to have some issues with your site if you choose to update right away. WP Minder clients will have staging sites set up to test the new version before going live and we’ll postpone the update for a week or two so the major bugs can be found and fixed. For more info, check out this announcement.

Second… What’s a staging site? Basically, it’s a copy of your live website you can safely work on when doing things like changing themes or upgrading complex plugins like WooCommerce or testing a new plugin. If you’re not on a host that provides staging sites for you, like WP Engine, the WP Staging plugin is a great way to quickly spin up a staging site. You can’t ‘push’ the changes back to the live site you can with more robust solutions, but you still get a site for testing updates and changes.

Finally… If you are running or planning an online store in WooCommerce or another ecommerce plugin, you’ll want to optimize your store for SEO. Here’s a guide to doing just that.